The singer has never had the film roles she deserves.

So Grace Jones stole the show at the Queen’s Jubilee concert, all hoops and hoopla. That news has got to be up there with “Sun rises”, “Grass still green” and “Ocean wet today.” What did you expect? Tuning in to Jones’s blissful extra-terrestrial frequency just for those four minutes of “Slave to the Rhythm” reminds me that, as far as the movies are concerned, Grace Jones is the one that got away. Cinema held on to a piece of Bowie and Jagger, Madonna and Prince, even Dylan, but no Grace Jones. Not yet.

Oh, she has appeared in films, and even, in some cases (such as the raunchy vampire movie Vamp), she has given off low-voltage jolts of that electricity which makes her such a compelling stage performer. But Bowie at least has The Man Who Fell to Earth; Jagger has Performance; Madonna has Desperately Seeking Susan (an inconsequential film but a part that decisively crystallised and fed her emerging persona); Prince has Purple Rain and Dylan has Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Keynote films, testaments to charisma, proof enough that these performers possessed a personality and a visual sense of themselves which could not be contained on vinyl alone.

Despite the tacky pleasures of Vamp, Grace Jones doesn’t have one of those movies to her name. She was used as a novelty act in Roger Moore’s final Bond film, A View to a Kill, like an exotic animal hired for display purposes only at a freemasons’ ball. (What a shame that Duran Duran were guilty of - I mean, responsible for - that film’s theme song even though Jones was in the building, so to speak.) She popped up in other, even more rickety projects unworthy of her jungle-cat elegance and Frankenstein’s-monster menace: Conan the Destroyer, a sequel which no one wanted, in which she had to suffer the indignity of competing with Arnold Schwarzenegger for the camera’s attention; the Eddie Murphy rom-com Boomerang. I have fond memories of seeing the oddball thriller Siesta and Alex Cox’s western Straight to Hell, both in the late 1980s, but in both instances Jones was lost in the celebrity smorgasbord, one special guest star among many. And if there’s one thing you should never do with Jones, it’s overlook her.

Mostly she has chosen wayward or unpromising projects that gave her no chance to dazzle as she does on stage. I’d love to know why. Were better offers not extended to her? Her background is in theatre; she also starred in the 1973 Blaxploitation film Gordon’s War (which I haven’t seen). But that’s slim pickings for an artist so steeped in the visual. The fact that her music gives such good cinema only makes me ache even more to see her in a juicy role on screen. Our lists of favourite movies are restricted to celluloid, but it must be acknowledged that Jones’s Nightclubbing album (like Lou Reed’s Berlin or Ariel Pink’s Worn Copy) is one of the most stubbornly haunting films never made. David Lynch or Paul Schrader or the Jane Campion of In the Cut could have cooked up a role worthy of her - they could have made a whole movie based on the Nightclubbing album cover of her square, sculpted, metallic face - but would they have been ready for the creative battles that might have ensued on set? Our one hope could be that Matthew Barney is preparing a Grace Jones vehicle, but before I get too excited I have to keep reminding myself that wanting it doesn’t make it so.

Ryan Gilbey is the New Statesman's film critic. He is also the author of It Don't Worry Me (Faber), about 1970s US cinema, and a study of Groundhog Day in the "Modern Classics" series (BFI Publishing). He was named reviewer of the year in the 2007 Press Gazette awards.